What types of things would a beginner linguistics university class be taught?

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What types of things would a beginner linguistics university class be taught?

For an elective I am currently enrolled for a business ethics philosophy class but I really do not want to take it. I only have a few other options I can take, and linguistics is one of them. English is my favourite class and I get pretty good grades in it, and was just wondering if linguistics is anything like that? I have very little knowledge of what exactly linguistics is, so if anyone could explain it to me that would be great. What types of assignments are given in a class like this?

Re: What types of things would a beginner linguistics university class be taught?

From what we had at lessons of linguistics
1 origin, from Indo-Iranian through Slavonic and Latin and Greek to English and German
2 Functional structure perspective -> how word-order and and utterance are organized
3 analysis of the language:
-- phonetic ( the lowest unit - phoneme)
-- syntactic ( the lowest unit - phrase)
-- morphological
etc.
4 tension and valence in a sentence
... and a lot of other things, whatever the teacher selects, I agree with fivejedjon

Re: What types of things would a beginner linguistics university class be taught?

Originally Posted by coralanderson

For an elective I am currently enrolled for a business ethics philosophy class but I really do not want to take it. I only have a few other options I can take, and linguistics is one of them. English is my favourite class and I get pretty good grades in it, and was just wondering if linguistics is anything like that? I have very little knowledge of what exactly linguistics is, so if anyone could explain it to me that would be great. What types of assignments are given in a class like this?

I would whole-heartedly suggest doing the linguistics course.
Business ethics is easy: if it's legal and it makes money, do it. If it's illegal, set up an undetectable scheme first, and then do it. The rest, for practical purposes, is lies.
On the other hand, if you enjoy English, you will learn a lot about language in a linguistics class.